After Lorville, we got a chance to go back and take a second swing at Area 18 and fully integrate it into the Persistent Universe. What were your involvements in Area 18?

Manuel and myself did the white box for it. He was quite fresh in the company then, actually. So I did some of the main areas and he helped with a lot of the extra stuff around. You can talk about it.

Yeah, so I personally worked on the Metro Center, actually, and some of the alleys leading away from that, and the alleys leading to Pacheco, connecting everything, and as well the plaza you come onto when you leave the habs.

Transit routes of those shuttles flying through there. First time we did a transit route that's not on a track, and we had to take a fairly solid object and make it bank and all this kind of crazy stuff.

That was a nightmare. It actually gives some freedom because you're not bound to the tracks, but it also creates more challenges.

How much do you bank? Like this in the curves? Like everyone just loses their lives. It took like three weeks to set up the transit.

For you guys, this is just something I was thinking about: how easy did you guys think it was to visualize Area 18 and how it would feel during white box? Because usually you get a feel for it, but I feel like Area 18, because of its nature of being a city planet with cities everywhere, it was really difficult to get a sense of how that space was going to feel in white box until we had some proper buildings and everything in there.

When I started with the white box, we did have the previous Area 18 to reference back to, of course, but there were certain things that we wanted to do to really sell the scale, right? For example, with the streets, we knew that we wanted to have buildings go up really high. And I know the first versions of Area 18 that we did had capped streets, which basically felt like they were going into a tunnel, right? So what we did in the white box, we tried to break that up. You have the buildings coming out on the side, but you still see a glimmer of light really, really far up somewhere, to give this illusion that you're really quite far down, right? And in general, just looking at various movies and stuff. It is one of my favorite settings, this cyberpunk-y feeling to it. So it is stuff that I also like playing and looking at in my free time. I kind of have that mindset of what to do. It takes a bit of creativity to see a white box, imagining this white thing here, that's going to be an amazing skyscraper. But it's just a box. Yes, but it could be a skyscraper.

I remember way back when we were trying to look at the initial version of Area 18 that we first put on a planet for one of our CitizenCon demos. We took the original Area 18 standalone level and basically just dropped it on a planet with the first iteration of the procedural planet tech, with all the hard surface elements on there. And internally, everyone's jaws were just on the floor. It was nuts. But in that same moment we also realized how much work was ahead of us as well, with how we were going to have to change that environment to make it not only work with the newfound physicality of the location but also performance-wise. And like Andreas is saying, this is half the reason we changed the layout as well, because a lot of those performance considerations had to be made. But also we learned a lot from the original layout to make it better as well. I look back on that fondly, because that was one of my first locations that I properly contributed to in the company. And from the art side of things, we did a lot of loose exploration into where we wanted the vibe to go for that version of Area 18, at least in the CitizenCon demo that we did way back then, that you can see is being brought through now, even though it's a completely different LZ now. But yeah, it was really fun for me.

You touched on a point there about dealing with the new tech and everything. What I did for Area 18, I specifically worked on the planet, along with Pascal. And I think I did some material work for Area 18. Taking the organic planet tech, I've spoken about this a lot in previous segments and things, but taking that organic planet tech and making that work for assets that are sometimes kilometers in size, sometimes hundreds of meters in height. And something that Boy said before as well: how do you take a flat city and put it on a curved planet, especially since our planets are a sixth scale or something like that, right? I don't know what the scale of our planets is, but there's so much work that you've got to do to figure that out.

I remember having so many conversations with you, with you pulling your hair out going, how the hell do I do this?

Yeah, it's like, hey Josh, meet me down at the pub after work, I've got to cry a little bit. But honestly, it was a lot of fun. I think me and Pascal had a lot of fun doing that. And there's so much that I'd go back and change about how we did the city. One thing specifically is just the mesh quality, really, for the planet city meshes. I think there's a lot that I can do to bring a lot of diversity to that now while still really keeping within the same performance. One really fun thing we did back then: basically, the way our procedural planet tech worked then is that you take these meshes and you spawn them procedurally on a splat map. So basically, a map that says on the red area, you're going to put in these meshes; on the green area, you're going to put in these meshes. And then it puts them in at different scales, rotations, et cetera. And one thing that I thought was really fun to do, because it felt like the planet was really still, and I really like adding movement to our locations, my favorite thing is to add movement to the locations. So, I hope I don't get too technical here, I'm going to try to make it easy: I got a texture that was panning, of these little glowing cars, right? And I got some strips of polygons that just went left, right, forward, and I spawned that across the entire planet, just to have a feel for it. And then you look back on it and suddenly there's all these little pinprick movements on the overall frame. And it just made it feel so much more alive. And I think now, with all the improvements in the tech and shaders and material work we've done, had we the chance to do that place all over again, it's one of the things that I could really, really improve, I think. Another thing, not that I want to take up the entire time here: because we went with a much more modern vibe with this ArcCorp than it was before, right? It was a bit more cyberpunk-y in feel before, whereas now the architecture is a little bit more contemporary. It feels a bit more like a downtown L.A. than it does a more 90s grungy city. But it was our first time doing large-scale panels, large-scale windows, large-scale this, large-scale that. And if you look at the quality of a building in ArcCorp and you look at the quality of a building in New Babbage and maybe Orison, it's leaps and bounds. The material work, the mesh work, it's leaps and bounds. We've really managed to take everything that we learned there every time and just improve on it, to a point where I'm like, man, had I had a chance, I could do so much more with ArcCorp.

I think I could jump in here because you touched on some things. My involvement was lead environment artist. So that's overseeing the landing zone from an art point of view, managing the team, giving them feedback, looking at schedules and things like that, boring stuff. I also did some actual artwork, looking at the composition of the cityscape as a whole. But in terms of what Luan was just saying, we had a lot of new stuff with ArcCorp. Again, Luan and Pascal really pushed the procedural planet tech to its limits at the time, because it's made for organic terrain, to spawn lots of trees on. It's not made for a planet to spawn lots of buildings on. There's a difference between a cluster of trees and a cluster of buildings and how they work, right? And also just in terms of the budgets: obviously we know an in-frame budget in terms of draw calls and poly counts, but in terms of how you distribute that between buildings, it was completely unknown. So you've got a landing zone itself with the hero buildings that you're walking around, and then you've got some buildings that you can fly around, and maybe they don't need to be such high detail, and then there's buildings lower to the ground and the small scattered ones by the procedural system. But in terms of trying to balance that all out, it was very much a new process. So it was a bit of trial and error, really, finding what we could push, what could work, knowing that it's not just a city, it's a planet city. It's a city that doesn't end. Whereas something like New Babbage is a city that does end eventually. It's a big city, but it eventually ends. And so you know, okay, let's do 1,000 buildings of 8,000 polys or something, and that's more quantifiable. Here it's like, well, I guess we just got to see how many buildings we can put on, how many polys we can push, and all that kind of thing. So it was very tricky trying to figure that out. But yeah, we did learn a lot from Lorville going to Area 18, such as don't have the spaceport in the city, which is what we did with Lorville. They're still quite close, but they're pushed away, and that helped with a lot of different things.

They're close in Star Citizen terms.

Yeah. Well, airports usually are not in a city, right? They're usually on the outskirts of a city, generally. So that's a good reason for that, right? You don't want planes flying around skyscrapers. But anyway, the other thing that Andreas touched on was the whole track and flying shuttle aspect. And I think it was actually a really good decision not to have trains everywhere. Not every landing zone is a train track. Some are flying, some are trains. And I think there was an expectation that every landing zone would just be trains at some point. But we decided collectively, no, let's mix it up a bit with ArcCorp and let's have a flying shuttle. And that allowed us to fly in between the buildings with the bus, which I actually really enjoyed. That's one of my favorite bits of Area 18, actually being able to go through the city and past the landings. It still gets me whenever I walk on the bridge and the bus is going past you. It's still such a great moment for me.

It is still one of my favorite landing zones, actually.